'Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking...'

Monday, May 27, 2013

i go all existential on everyone...

     Oh, and yes, I really did intend to imply that if you even refuse to say yes or no to such evil, then you are implicated in the evil. There are only two ways to go in these days my dear readers, only two ways. 

is this evil banal?

     If you feel up to facing real evil at its most clinical, precise, cool, and seemingly benign, do have a look at this piece, in The New England Journal of Medicine, on The Groningen Protocol:

Of the 200,000 children born in the Netherlands every year, about 1000 die during the first year of life. For approximately 600 of these infants, death is preceded by a medical decision regarding the end of life. Discussions about the initiation and continuation of treatment in newborns with serious medical conditions are one of the most difficult aspects of pediatric practice. Although technological developments have provided tools for dealing with many consequences of congenital anomalies and premature birth, decisions regarding when to start and when to withhold treatment in individual cases remain very difficult to make. Even more difficult are the decisions regarding newborns who have serious disorders or deformities associated with suffering that cannot be alleviated and for whom there is no hope of improvement.

Like I said, this is the real evil my friends, and it's coming your way whether you like it or not. Time to say goodbye to the illusion of neutrality.
     I need to stare into space for a while.
     Peace out.
     You know, I've seen a Cease and Desist Letter, and it's not pleasant.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

stockholm calling...

     It looks like the only real question is, which criminal gang will prevail in Stockholm? And will we see History As Farce in the streets of Tartu and other cities in Estonia? In any case, I assume that sales of Death Metal have soared throughout the Baltic region and all over the Nordic Wastes in recent days. Expect a resurgence of odes to Odin on the far right, which is curiously aligned with radical Islam (wonder if they know that?). Meanwhile all legitimate authority is doomed. 

money money money...

     So, the clutch in my Xterra is failing, and failing fast. I'd say it's got another three or four days. I just spent some happy hours looking for a good transmission shop - I refuse to take it the dealer, where they'll rake me over with all their incidental fees and suchlike. So tomorrow it's all on foot, then to an appointment Tuesday morning, and thence, at last, to the shop, where I'll get to spend a great deal of money and get no scotch or books or beach front suites in return.
     Life is good.

Friday, May 24, 2013

still with the not caring...

     My indifference has reached truly epic proportions. I didn't think it possible to care less about what happens today, but verily verily it seems likely that I have yet to plumb the depth and height, the length and breadth, of my indifference. 
     Why work at all? you ask, quite reasonably. My only answer is that I said I would. That's all. I made commitments, so I will keep my word. Everything else is a matter of supreme, even sublime, irrelevance. 

Thursday, May 23, 2013

some blank verse, unedifying yet apt...

I do much wonder, how much one man must
Allow himself to endure before he
Rebels at last against the infantile
Assaults of every senseless asshole flung
His way by a feckless and idiot world.
No, still don't care. You might say I've had enough.
     I joined the North American Patristics Society because its acronym spells NAPS
     Yeah, that was a reach.

strange this...

     Ever had one of those weeks where you just couldn't bring yourself to care? I have to be on a roof in about, o, eight hours, and really, it's a matter of complete indifference to me. I'll show up, do my job, whatever - couldn't care less. 
     Huh.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

wherein i invent a word...

     Good night all you spammers and spammettes.
     Peace out.

stalked by an Italian Dominican...

     Can't seem to get away from this Tomas d'Aquino character. Anyone else ever have this problem?

i blissfully accept reality...

     It seems that maybe five real people read ER. Most of my blog traffic seems to be from spam sites.    
     Cool. I have become Officially Irrelevant.

Seminary! Romans 10.14-17! I'm hyperventilating!

     Finally made a decision that is long overdue - this Autumn I'm applying to the MDiv program at Nashotah House in Wisconsin. 
     Yes, you heard that right. 
     It's been, oh, lessee, sixteen years since I dropped out of seminary, so no one can accuse me of rushing into this. 
     And yes, I know this means we have to stay put at a parish. Way ahead of you there, my friends, way ahead of you. I think the congregation even has a little money stashed away for seminarians. In any event, they have sent folks to Nashotah House before - they're rogues, don't you know.
     What's more, the company I sell for has an office about forty minutes from the Nashotah campus, and the neighborhoods I'd work are close by. That's a little scary, no?
     I even like the quasi-monastic schedule.
     O well, nothing has happened yet. Who knows if they'll be foolish enough to admit me.
     God help us all.

Friday, May 17, 2013

death is so proud...

     Huh. If you have a few minutes you don't mind losing to the void, do have a look at an essay entitled 'The Rationalist Way of Death.' 
     The first thing that I noticed is this: 'As for the business of seeing the body and saying goodbye, and the trouble and expense of coffins and flowers and funerals: what are they but relics of morbid superstitions that we should have got rid of centuries ago.' 
     Well, that busyness is a relatively recent growth; it's a growth industry in fact. All those superstitious centuries ago, no one bothered with any of that. As we've grown more and more sentimental, godless, and stupid, we've gussied up the funeral so that now it's really just an excuse for some branding and an upsell or three.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

almost a movie review...

     So, as it turns out, Star Trek into Darkness isn't that good. It's full of provocative ideas, but ends up a muddle. 

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

hegel vs jason in hell, a freddie krueger film...

     It's particularly annoying to discover that the Trinitarian theology of Dumitru Staniloae is really just some warmed over Hegelian whimsy. Hegel Hegel Hegel - he's everywhere, can't get away from him.
     If you see Hegel walking toward you, you might attempt in vain to kill him, only to end up reflecting that your encounter with him as a Thou is a moment of Self-Reflection and thus Awakening to the Spirit, or some such. Hegel eludes me I'm afraid, so that's the best you'll get.
     The truth is, Hegel is like one of those ridiculous horror movie avatars, Jason or Freddie, who just will not die. Just when you think you've once and for all dismembered Hegel's silly arguments; just when you relax, weeping, in the happy thought that it's all over; Hegel at that moment will sit up in the background, turn toward you, and raise his hand to commence a lecture.
     Hegel will always be with us. Would Napoleon had never marched through Jena.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

let us bow down and worship our leader...

     So, am I the only one disturbed by this icon?
     And an icon it is, dear reader. You see our Great Leader, read his Inspired Words, and can thrill in your communion with such Greatness, such Leaderliness. 
     That someone seems to have caught the Great Leaderly Leader in mid-speech is behovely my even kindred, for it is through his Powers of Eloquence that our Leaderly Leader Leads us to that North Star of, well, what? I forget just what that is, but he's going to Lead us there, and it will be good. 
     Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to speak with this nice fellow from the IRS.
     Peace out.

i wonder if oprah has interviewed him yet...

     So, it seems that Alain de Bottom succeeds in bringing Eros down to our middling world. This is hardly surprising, given that his other works and pomps - the ones I've bothered to try that is - are somewhere between boring and nonexistent. De Bottom is truly the Rob Bell of atheist middlebrow philosophes

Monday, May 13, 2013

'ford was a god who danced'...

     While talking with a friend a couple of hours ago, Henry Ford slithered into the conversation. We started talking about Ford, assembly lines, square dancing, and everything I said sounded rather, well, familiar. Then I realized that I was stealing without a pang of conscience themes from one of my favorite footnotes by the evil David Bentley Hart.* You know Hart, the jolly fellow who forgets his notes and always has a cold or some such condition when he gives a lecture, and who according to some wiseacres requires a Burning Bush and choirs of Seraphim to inform him that it would be good to brush his teeth. Anyway, without ado of any kind, here 'tis.

     'Nietzsche's avowed god, Dionysius, is of course an endlessly protean and deceptive deity and a wearer of many masks. When he makes his unannounced appearance at the end of Beyond Good and Evil, as its secret protagonist, whose divine irony has occultly enlivened its pages, he exercises his uniquely divine gift, the numinous privilege of veiling and unveiling, concealment and manifestation; he is the patron deity, appropriately, of the philosophical project of genealogy. But perhaps another veil remains to be lifted, and the god may be invited to step forth again, in his still more essential identity: Henry Ford. . . . And there could scarcely be a more vibrant image of univocity's perpetual beat of repetition - of eternal recurrence, the eternal return of the same - than the assembly line: difference here is certainly not analogical, but merely univocal, and the affirmation of one instance is an affirmation of the whole. It is, moreover, well documented that Ford was a devotee of square dancing, which is clearly akin to (perhaps descended from) the dithyrambic choreia of the bacchantes; Ford was a god who danced,' The Beauty of the Infinite, pg. 435.

*Yes, I have favorite footnotes. Doesn't everybody?

Sunday, May 12, 2013

say No to mother's day...

     Why yes, I still hate Mother's Day, and avoid all churches everywhere for fear of being drowned in treacle and swinish sentiment. Let's squeeze out all the ambiguity, all the ways of going wrong in a family, so we can worship an image called, nowadays, Mom. And by all means, remind me of all the mothers who are still alive, who didn't die of cancer. Not that I wish they had died of cancer, no no no, it's just that I would rather have my real, flesh and blood, flawed and sometimes daft, yet for all that intelligent survivor of a mother alive and well thank you very much.
     But hey, we'll sure spend a lot on useless crap and brunches, so this might help this quarter's growth. See, God really does bring Good from Evil.
     So, to recap - loved my mother; hate, hate, hate Mother's Day. Don't even get me started on Father's Day.

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

dum dee dee dum dum dum dee dee...


     Just spent an hour and a half analyzing an insurance adjuster's estimate. It was so, so wrong. 
     Don't envy me because my life is a rich, full oyster.

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

a brief note on Anselm...

     This passage tells you why almost everyone is wrong about Anselm's Cur Deus Homo:

     'You are not drawing a proper distinction, it seems to me, between, on the one hand, what Christ did because of the demands of his obedience, and, on the other, the suffering, inflicted upon him because he maintained his obedience, which he underwent even though his obedience did not demand it' [emphasis added for emphasis].

     Anselm goes to great lengths to unwind this, and his unwinding is not without fault, but really now, I don't see any kind of theory of atonement in the work, let alone one where the Father intentionally inflicts pain and suffering on the Son (pain and suffering being distinct).
     Then again, I'm not looking for one.

is this a 'blurb'?

     Just listened to this lecture by one Dr. Charles Stang, wherein he tells us about his study Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite. The book sounds cool, but there is a problem - apophasis is not primarily about negation. Negation is a means, a method, occasioned by excess. Perhaps he addresses that in the book. We'll see.

i interpret the daily news - a lazy, cross-platform post, edited for prime-time...


     At the moment we are dazzled by an appealing nihilism - jouissance, s'il vous plaît, à l'intérieur du rien sans nôtre Créateur. (Couldn't help it; hope the French isn't too appalling for y'all.) We have yet to plumb the depths of the Nothing from which God summoned us into being. Over the top? I don't think so, but then again I have a secret stash of Existentialist nonsense in the attic. 
     Seriously, that bastard Sartre has truly trickled down on us all. We are deluded that doing precedes being, and that 'knowing is a modality of having', and not a modality of loving - the catastrophic consequences of which we see all around us. We imagine that we ourselves summon ourselves out of the Nothing by acts of sheer will. So no amount of constant surveillance, no reckless sexual self-immolations, not even the complete commodification of the human person, can possibly trouble us, as we have no nature, no being, to damage by such pervasive assaults. Such a commercialized police state as seems inexorably aborning can be spun thus as a good, for it will ratify our voluntarist self-creation at every discreet moment. 
     There you have our most radical manifestation of Sin yet, and we here in the ruins of the West at least seem to be enjoying it all far too much for simple greed, or lust, or any particular deadly sin to be our motivation. Money, the accumulation of stuff for its own sake, is merely one means to this End. One can as easily be a Sojourners reading Jim Wallis acolyte as a hoarder of money - it's All The Same.

well that was stupid...

     I indulged in a few slices of pizza a few hours ago. 
     Apparently that was a mistake. 
     Twenty years ago I could eat five pizzas between midnight and one in the morning and sleep soundly until five the next day. Not that I ever did that. No, that would be wrong, very, very wrong. 
     Anyway, as I said, I seem to have made a mistake. So I'm up. Break out the acid reducer and a book - it's a party.

Saturday, May 4, 2013

     Been reading the news. I'm now sad, and sick at heart. I need some Julian of Norwich. And tea, lots and lots of tea.

gitmo comes to the heartland?

     I am truly terrified at the thought of some kind of 'Gitmo North', located in Illinois of all places. (Then again, why not there?) That could be the first island in our very own Gulag Archipelago. 
     But hey, that's crazy talk. This is a Progressive President, and we all know how liberal Progressives are.

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

the alexandrian thug stops by...

     A little something for the fun of it:

     'Therefore, Christ has given his own body for the life of all, and through it he makes life dwell in us again. How he does this I will explain as I am able. Since the life-giving Word of God has taken up residence in the flesh, he has transformed it so that it has his own good attribute, that is, life. And since, in an ineffable mode of union, he has rendered it life-giving, just as he himself is by nature. For this reason, the body of Christ gives life to those who participate in it. His body drives out death when that body enters those who are dying, and it removes decay since it is fully pregnant with the Word who destroys decay,' Cyril of Alexandria.

Eucharist, my friends, it's called Eucharist, and it's good for what ails us.

nothing new under the sun...

     'Many of them introduced numerous families of uncertain deities and, imagining that the male and female sex was present in the divine natures, spoke about the birth and the successions of gods from gods. Others proclaimed that there were greater or lesser gods and gods differing in power. Some asserted that there was no God at all and venerated only that nature which came into existence through accidental movements or collisions. A great many declared in accordance with popular belief that there was a God, but asserted that this same God had no concern or interest in human affairs. Some, however, worshiped those corporeal and visible forms of created things themselves in the elements of earth and heaven. Lastly, certain individuals placed their gods in the images of man, animals, beasts, and serpents, and confined the God of the universe and the Author of infinity within the narrow limits of metals, stones, and genealogies,' Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitate I.4.
     We do indeed seem to have been spinning in place for millennia, and all those fashionable heresies and every kind of idolatry, and the nihilism of atheism itself, have always been with us, and always will be until the end of the end times. 

take and read...

     'A Medieval model of education stresses the importance of learning by way of imitation; that imitation is part of classical education might seem obvious, rote, however more is at stake in imitation than first meets the eye. Imitation is the desire to share being, to see as the other sees, to create as the other creates, to be as the other has being. Imitation sits at the center of Christian theosis and ethics; “Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ,” writes Paul. The Christian who imitates Christ has become like Christ; we may not become like Christ unless we imitate Him. We come to know Christ through His imitation, through seeing the world as Christ sees, through the intuitive act of being Christ as we are ourselves. We do not plunder Christ, neither do we plunder Paul. Jesus Christ was crucified in the flesh; no series of tenets and methods and techniques was crucified on your behalf.'
     He's on to something.

just stunning...

     'At $72.8 Trillion, Presenting The Bank With The Biggest Derivative Exposure In The World (Hint: Not JPMorgan)'. 
     
     What the f*&(^(& f(&??! 

more on the cabal at calvinist international...

     As you may have noted, dear reader, I have had it up to here with the kids at Calvinist International. At one time I thought it a fairly scholarly endeavor, one that was honorable even if wrong-headed at times. Even then, when I thought it wrong-headed, I remained in denial and wrote that off to the inevitable disagreements I would have with any devoted and traditionalist-minded Reformed gaggle. Now, I see it as sinister posturing, with a thinly veiled political agenda that would make one shudder were it not so patently absurd.
      Put simply, for all their talk of freedom and the like, the kids at CI are prepping us for totalitarianism, plain and simple. This is difficult to discern because they seem to believe in all sincerity that somehow we can resurrect the office of the Christian Magistrate who benevolently oversees a pluralist kingdom where disputes on matters of morals and political moment are adjudicated on the basis of a commonly accepted norm of natural reason. All the while, of course, the Christian Magistrate is also keen to manage the affairs of the various churches in all their diversity. That diversity itself is a result of the fact that the Church is fundamentally invisible, a crudely Platonic affair, with each particular congregation a fragment manifesting perhaps a shadow of that True Invisible Church.
     To further this agenda, Steven Wedgeworth has recourse to the old cliché that the Church in the first centuries was in essence fissiparous and chaotic. This hoary notion, dear to Mainline revisionists and Fundamentalists alike, is both stupid and easily refuted. I mean, is it not clear that there was always a firm, clear proclamation of the Trinitarian Gospel starting at Pentecost? That this was contested, pressured, marginalized, hounded, misunderstood, understood variously by different bishops and the like - that, in short, the Church lived in real human history - is both a fact, and trivial. 
     This reminds me of the time he dismissed Cyril of Alexandria on the basis of a passage from Clement of Alexandria taken out of context and then read as tendentiously as possible. This represents a movement in a larger critique of patristic Christology, which again is nothing new in revisionist circles, nor is the practice of noting that then, as now, there was a riot of people writing theology of one stripe or another and declaring, on that basis, that there was no essential unity to the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. That there is a complimentary fantasia about that Early Church hovering blameless and unscathed above the sublunary world does not sanction a shoddy and manipulative reading of the first few centuries of the Church's history. 
     So, what are the implications of all this?
     The distinctively, shall we say, English form of Fascism thus constituted on the basis of Locke and Grotius and Hobbes, unopposed by a Church crippled by doctrinal skepticism and thus lacking the institutional weight to stand against the State thus constituted, would be of a soft, almost yielding sort, but it would be a form of public ideological and ecclesial micromanagement all the same. (As an aside, how folks can miss the totalitarian implications of Locke's thought in particular, both his political thought and its foundational epistemology, is a mystery not to be plumbed this side of the eschaton.)
     Again, this would be terrifying were it not pure fantasy. As much as they hate the word, we are living in apocalyptic times. The Church is shrinking both in terms of numbers and in terms of influence in this Northern Hemispherical Nightmare so fast it's like watching a time-elapsed film. In the South, persecution is rampant - show me the benevolent Christian Magistrate in Nigeria, or the Sudan. Christians are fleeing, or being killed, throughout the historic homes of the faith in the Levant and around the Mediterranean. As soon as the Vatican is sacked, and Mt Athos annexed by the EU, the game will be over. To come closer to home, when you face, inter alia, militants who know they're killing children for convenience and profit, and think it a virtuous act, some sort of Lockean bastardization of Thomist natural reason will not save you. To my ear you have no choice but to bring out the howitzers of prophetic denunciation and ascetic prayer and fasting. 
     Finally, each of them, Escalante in particular, have mistaken their personal idiosyncratic tics for the foundations of a movement. It is a movement, moreover, that has shown itself to be without honor and intellectual integrity. It saddens me to say that, my friends, because I had high hopes for so many of those involved.